Field recordings

Field Recordings. Five Years Gallery. London. UK. With Investigation Three. February 2010.

Our Proposal

Name: Investigation Three
Title: 34/71 Broadway Market

Robbie: To record in the field is to enter into a live space, one that is mostly unprepared, although the prepared may enter it in some form. This inevitably contains an element of the ‘document’ and all the problems that come with this concept; how one enters into the space without unreasonably altering it, not forgetting that ‘one’ is more often not native to the field.

Lucie: Sound resonates live throughout the field. Past struggles resonate within its present conscience. As a field study, with the conscience of the past and the sound of the present we listen, we capture and re-appropriate, in attempt to make a connection between these meta/physical fields and ourselves.

Rashmi: To look at the gallery as a field that is extendable to it’s immediate surroundings, opening it up. This process involves an awareness of the artist as a field in herself, bringing in what she hears to be heard anew.

Investigation Three: We speak into a microphone, words that were clear and concise become cluttered and we wonder what this could mean. What’s this got to do with field recording?
At which point the outside comes in………
On the surface speakers begin to tell a story of the immediate and recent present, but once scratched, you can hear the sound, or more accurately, the non-sound of what was. The ghost of another struggle in vain, played out in the name of local residents for local workers; now merely a poetic footnote in the gradual degradation of the community, to that of capital.

Notes on the Process:

Lets meet at Tony’s cafe they tell me. In that sentence what has been erased has been brought back to life, even if it is boarded up, inaccessible, empty. It is a space where we meet, where we can meet. It is this door they barricaded from the inside.

Or is it?
Do I know?
Do I prop it up because I so want to believe that this is possible.
Am I listening to the space or am I listening to my own desire?

The promise of a transformation waits in the headphones. The site I would have passed by umpteen number of times without even looking at was set to become important.
I put the headphones on, listened. Films, Images, Words from struggles past was what I saw. I heard the present outside with the past locked away in sight, there on the other side, inside.

Did this experience re-constitute me? Viewing all experiences as re-constitutive this was. More than that there was now another site in London which was reserved for those who had been there, for a struggle that was fought and legally lost.

I look out for Spirit. Every time I see someone who resembles him I think could this be him?
Would I speak to him if I met him?
What would I say?
What do I want?